Metal Slug (series)

Metal Slug (メタルスラッグ, Metaru Suraggu) is a series of run and gun video games first released on Neo Geo arcade machines and game consoles originally created by Nazca and later by SNK. It has also been ported to various consoles, such as the Sega Saturn, PlayStation, Neo Geo Pocket Color, Game Boy Advance, PlayStation 2, Xbox and Xbox 360 and more. There is also an anthology of the first 7 games in the main series (including Metal Slug X ) available for the Wii, PlayStation Portable, and PlayStation 2.

SNK staff state that Metal Slug is one of their best international hits, the other being The King of Fighters, and they are always willing to expand the series.

Contents

The first game's story involved the Peregrine Falcon (PF) Squad, a small but skilled team of soldiers serving under the Regular Army's special operations division, who fight against the army of General Donald Morden in order to prevent a massive coup d'etat and the creation of a New World Order under General Morden. Later games featured characters from the Sparrows Unit, which is under the control of the Regular Army's intelligence division. In the games following the first, the PF Squad also battles an alien threat to Earth (the Mars People), as well as several other supernatural threats including yetis, zombies, ambulatory Venus flytraps, giant crabs and mummies. Outlandish elements were removed from the fourth game to return to the feel of the original title, which resulted in poor critical and commercial reception. The fifth moved to the motif of modern guerrilla warfare, leaving only traces of the series signature quirky humor and paranormal enemies (except for the final boss). Metal Slug 6 returned to the plot of the first three installments, bringing back Morden's Rebel Army and the Mars People.

The mechanics of the series is characteristic of run and guns: The enemies come in hordes, the weapons have high fire rates. All of these characteristics come from the Contra series, which the game's mechanics is based on. Metal Slug however takes the concepts introduced in Contra and expands upon them. First and foremost is the ability to perform melee attacks. In most run and guns, contact with an enemy leads to immediate death. In this series, contact only results in either party's death if an attack is performed. This leads to the ability for the player to run in and use melee attacks to take down a number of troops.